Ryan Hopkins filmed his first TEDx talk from a toilet cubicle, ran a hundred episodes of Toilet Break Wellbeing on LinkedIn and turned the script into an Amazon No. 1 business book. Three years before any of that he was a former rugby player with a broken leg, an eating disorder, and a Halifax bank clerk who found himself unable to speak across the counter.

In an hour with James Kirkham, Ryan draws the line the wellness industry refuses to draw: wellness is a $9.2 trillion industry trying to sell you a hot stone massage; wellbeing is your subjective satisfaction with your life, and the two are not the same thing.

He explains why an Oxford Wellbeing Research review found that eleven of thirteen workplace wellbeing interventions worsened wellbeing in the short term, and why a stress-management webinar inside a 49-hour week shines a light on the problem and does nothing to fix it.

He covers his rugby injury and the bulimia that followed, the one-way flight to Argentina with £600 from a sold Vauxhall Tigra, the Ecuadorian hostel he helped build on the side of a mountain, the wildcard slot onto the Deloitte grad scheme, the LinkedIn show Toilet Break Wellbeing that ran a hundred episodes and became 52 Weeks of Wellbeing, the Wetherspoons table in Putney (212, by the water) where the book got written, the fintech where he cut five hours a week off the average work week and saved 2.4 million hours, the NatWest project with JAAQ that correlates with a 6.9% drop in mental health absence, why bricklayers are the best meditators in the world, what 'orthosomnia' is doing to your sleep, and Rory Sutherland's argument that an office needs a library space and a pub space and nothing else.

He ends on the call he used to make to his nan every day at 12:15.

Chapters

(00:00) Cold open and intro

(02:00) Tell me a story: the book that started on a toilet

(06:30) Rugby, debt and a one-way ticket to Argentina

(09:30) Bulimia, a Halifax bank counter and the call to mum

(12:30) Oxford Brookes, the Deloitte wildcard and the work

(16:00) Wellbeing is the output of good work, not an event

(19:00) Wellness vs wellbeing: the $9.2 trillion confusion

(23:00) Why bricklayers are the best meditators in the world

(24:30) Sleep apps, orthosomnia and the wellness paradox

(27:30) Healthi: putting a number on the value of looking after people

(36:00) Calling Nan at 12:15

(38:00) Library space and pub space: what work looks like after the laptop

"Everything I do is to help people not end up where I did, and if they do, to know they're not alone." — Ryan Hopkins

About the guest

Ryan Hopkins is a workplace wellbeing specialist, a TEDx Shoreditch speaker, and the Amazon No. 1 bestselling author of 52 Weeks of Wellbeing (Kogan Page). He started his working life as a trainee electrician, came back through Oxford Brookes after a year travelling through South America, joined Deloitte as a wildcard grad, led wellbeing at Sainsbury's Tech, and returned to Deloitte to build out its wellbeing consultancy with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. He is now the founder of Healthi, a corporate health platform that quantifies the impact of an organisation's healthcare spend, with pilots launching in the UK, UAE and US.

Listen elsewhere Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/storyco/id1886770413 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@StoryCoPodcast Website: https://www.storyco.site Follow: @StoryCoPodcast

Credits Host: James Kirkham Guest: Ryan Hopkins Producer: Jago Lee Assistant Producer: Nelly Batt Editor: Ryan O'Meera Music: Doubt Point Recorded at TYX Studios, Kings Cross, London

Joe Fattorini sat in a bath of red wine in the Atacama Desert, filmed himself talking to camera and uploaded the clip to YouTube. Years later the producer Mel Jappy found it, four-by-three and badly cropped, and built The Wine Show around him.

In an hour with James Kirkham, Joe and Mel walk through how a show ostensibly about wine ended up in 110 countries and in front of hundreds of millions of viewers by refusing to be about wine. The first rule Mel set Joe: never talk about anything you cannot taste in the glass. The second, when pitching: three sentences only — a question, two numbers, a visual image. They cover the Argentina episode about Malbec they were filming the day the Trump administration announced its Muslim ban, and the producer who burst into tears on a vineyard wall; the Georgian supra, a dinner whose name means tablecloth because the food is meant to hide the cloth; the Moldova shoot where a Red Army parade gatecrashed a piece to camera and a bear of a man told the crew, on the lens, to be quiet; Hermann Göring's wine collection in a Chișinău cellar; Howard Gossage's 1962 Paul Masson ad copy ("cheaper than cars, quieter than hi-fis, tastier than stamps") that Joe still considers the best wine ad ever written; The Picnic Society's 1801 rule of six bottles a head; and the 1791 Vin de Constance, dropped in Constantia and sieved before it reached the glass, that Napoleon drank on Saint Helena in the year Mozart died.

Chapters(00:00) Cold open and intro

(01:30) Tell me a story: a bath of red wine in the Atacama

(05:00) Pitching a show that should not work(

08:00) Finding Joe at the bottom of a YouTube recommendation column

(14:00) Cheese, not snobbery: why most people think they don't know wine

(19:00) Ego in a box and the wrong-size trousers

(24:00) The drunken monkey, the pheasant slippers and the show's real fans

(30:00) Evergreen by design: would you make it the same today

(32:00) Argentina, Georgia, Moldova — the day the show wasn't the show

(44:00) Three sentences to pitch: the producer's rules that travel

(53:00) The 1791 Vin de Constance: Napoleon's wine, Mozart's year

"The wine show is not about wine. It's about great stories." — Mel Jappy

About the guests

Mel Jappy is a BAFTA-nominated executive producer with nine years at the BBC and credits including Who Do You Think You Are? and Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection. She trained as a solicitor, came into television as a MasterChef contestant, and created and produced The Wine Show.

Joe Fattorini is a philosophy graduate, was wine correspondent for The Herald for fourteen years, an International Wine Challenge Personality of the Year, and the presenter The Guardian once called "the Attenborough of Oddbins."

Listen elsewhere

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/storyco/id1886770413YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@StoryCoPodcast

Website: https://www.storyco.siteFollow: @StoryCoPodcast

Credits

Host: James Kirkham

Guests: Joe Fattorini and Mel Jappy

Producer: Jago Lee

Assistant Producer: Nelly Batt

Editor: Ryan O'Meera

Music: Doubt Point

Recorded at TYX Studios, Kings Cross, London

Kathleen Saxton was repossessed out of her family home at 11. By 40 she was running C-suite headhunting at The Lighthouse Company. She trained as a psychotherapist along the way and now argues boards have governance for cash, finance and risk, and none at all for behaviour.

In an hour with James Kirkham she walks through the memoir she wrote on domestic abuse and the lawyer she hired to defend it; the flute teacher Norman Blow who took her on after she got a clean note out of the mouthpiece on her second try; the safe-cracking interview method she used to read C-suite candidates at Lighthouse; the candidate's story that pushed her to enrol at Regent's University; what private equity buyers and founders are actually doing to each other after the deal closes; "human remains" wellbeing post-COVID, and the executive whose chair refused him half an hour off a board to dial into a friend's funeral; AI as triage versus AI as treatment; what covert narcissism actually looks like, the dark tetrad, and the moment her ex-fiancé asked if she was wearing that to the wedding; lobbying the BACP and UKCP to add narcissism as a search specialism; the difference between what UK and US guests will say on tape; and the Felix Dennis answer she keeps thinking about.

Chapters :

(00:00) Cold open and intro

(01:30) The memoir her lawyer warned her not to publish

(03:30) Repossessed at 11: shame, sofas and two gerbils

(07:30) Sweet tooth and 'don't be a Coca-Cola bottle'

(10:30) Cracking the safe: how she read C-suite candidates

(14:00) The interview that sent her to train as a therapist

(21:00) Founders, private equity and the wellbeing mask

(25:30) AI in therapy and in the boardroom

(30:30) No governance for behaviour

(33:00) Narcissism: grandiose, covert and the dark tetrad

(39:30) Writing the book and training other therapists

(47:30) What's next: live radio, a documentary, accessibility

"I can't bear the thought that someone can't be helped." — Kathleen Saxton

Mentioned in this episode

• My Parent the Peacock — Kathleen Saxton (book, on narcissistic parents)

• Endless — Kathleen Saxton (forthcoming memoir)

• DSM-5 — American Psychiatric Association (the diagnostic manual Kathleen references on cluster B and the nine narcissism traits)

• Billions — Showtime (the Wendy character as house psychologist)

• Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over — BBC (cited as the format Kathleen would borrow for a narcissism documentary)

• This Morning — ITV (Kathleen's regular phone-in slot)

• The Lighthouse Company — C-suite executive search firm Kathleen founded

• Psyched Ventures — Kathleen's clinical-psychology-into-business venture

• Sky, Global, Omnicom — Kathleen's prior media and advertising posts

• Regent's University, London — where she trained as a psychotherapist

• The Priory — psychiatric placement during training

• BACP and UKCP — UK psychotherapy accrediting bodies; Kathleen successfully lobbied for narcissism as a search specialism

• Felix Dennis — publisher; the "I forgot to get married" anecdote

• Bruce Daisley — interviewer in the Dennis story

• Matt Shetna — co-founder with Kathleen of Advertising Week Europe

• Ronnie Scott's, London — venue of the Dennis interview

• Cambridge Analytica — referenced via the whistleblower lawyer Kathleen hired

About Kathleen Saxton

Kathleen Saxton spent three decades at Sky, Global and Omnicom and founded the C-suite headhunters The Lighthouse Company. She is a qualified psychotherapist with rooms in London and New York and a co-founder of Psyched Ventures. My Parent the Peacock hit Amazon category number one. Endless is forthcoming.

Listen elsewhere

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/storyco/id1886770413 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@StoryCoPodcast

Website: https://www.storyco.site

Follow: @StoryCoPodcast

Credits

Host: James Kirkham

Guest: Kathleen Saxton

Producer: Jago Lee

Assistant Producer: Nelly Batt

Editor: Ryan O'Meera

Music: Doubt Point

Recorded at TYX Studios, Kings Cross, London